In the mid-1970s, the NHL tried to make Cleveland the home of a big-league hockey club, and was doomed from the start. The Cleveland Barons were born from the ashes of the California Golden Seals, but almost everything that could go wrong did. Poor attendance, unpaid players, and constant financial chaos made their two-year run one of the strangest experiments in NHL history. This is the story of how the Cleveland Barons became the league’s last team to fold — and how their legacy still lives on today.
Golden Seals become Barons
In 1966, the NHL signed a $3.6 million TV contract with CBS, which included expanding into new markets—particularly in the western U.S. Six new franchises joined the league, including the California Seals in the San Francisco Bay Area. The team was primarily owned by millionaire socialite Barry Van Gerbig, who had previously bought the Western Hockey League’s San Francisco Seals with plans to bring them into the NHL.
In their final WHL season, the Seals moved from the aging Cow Palace to the new Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena. Van Gerbig renamed them the “California Seals” to appeal to the wider Bay Area, but fans in San Francisco weren’t interested in commuting to the east bay. After a disastrous first NHL season, the team was rebranded again as the “Oakland Seals.” Van Gerbig frequently threatened to move the team, and Seals’ head coach Bert Olmstead even supported a move to Vancouver.
A potential ownership group from New York also offered to buy them and move them to Buffalo. The NHL blocked both moves, partly to protect its CBS contract, which led to the Seals filing an antitrust lawsuit. The case dragged on until 1974, with the court ruling the NHL had not violated any antitrust laws.
Meanwhile, the Seals briefly found success, making the playoffs between the 1968-69 season and 1969-70 seasons, only to be eliminated in the first round both times. By the third season, Van Gerbig attempted to sell the team to a group backed by football announcer Pat Summerall, but the deal fell through.
Eventually, Van Gerbig sold the Seals to Oakland A’s owner Charlie Finley, beginning a new chapter in the team’s Bay Area saga.
Charlie Finley, known for his eccentricity as the A’s owner, immediately put his stamp on the Seals. He briefly renamed them the “Bay Area Seals” before switching to the “California Golden Seals” just two games into the 1970-71 season. Finley changed the team colors to green and gold to match the A’s and controversially forced players to wear white skates—an unpopular move that lasted only one season.
A positive change was adding player names on the back of jerseys, a practice the NHL later standardized in 1977. Despite the rebrand, the Seals struggled on the ice, finishing last in the Western Division and making one of the most lopsided trades in NHL history, sending a future first-round pick that became Hall of Famer Guy Lafleur to Montreal.
Seasons of poor performance frustrated Finley, who tried to sell the team and relocate it to Indianapolis, but the NHL blocked the move. In 1974, Finley sold the team back to the NHL, marking the start of the end for the Seals in the Bay Area.
Rumors emerged that the Seals could move to Denver for the 1976-77 season, contingent on finding a new owner. In 1975, San Francisco hotel magnate Melvin Swig purchased the team, hoping to move them into a new arena, but the project fell through after a failed mayoral election. With no new arena prospects, the NHL essentially greenlit Swig to relocate the team out of the Bay Area.
Barons Struggle
The Seals’ minority owners, George and Gordon Gund, convinced Swig to move the team to their hometown in Cleveland, Ohio. On April 4, 1976, the last ever California Golden Seals game took place, with a 5-2 win over the Los Angeles Kings. That summer, the NHL formally approved the Seals’ relocation to Cleveland, where they would rebrand as the “Cleveland Barons.”
The Barons played at the Richfield Coliseum in suburban Richfield, Ohio, halfway between Cleveland and Akron. Originally built for the World Hockey Association’s Crusaders (who left for Minnesota before the Barons arrived) and the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, Richfield Coliseum had the NHL’s largest seating capacity at 18,544.
On paper, the move to Cleveland should have energized the franchise. The city had been considered as a potential relocation site for an NHL team as early as 1935, when believe or not the Montreal Canadiens considered moving there after having financial struggles. On top of that, Cleveland was home to the original minor league Cleveland Barons of the American Hockey League. From 1937 to 1973, the Barons were the most successful club in the AHL, winning their division ten times and nine Calder (CALL-der) Cups. The franchise folded in 1973 however, when the Cleveland Crusaders of the WHA, a professional hockey club, came to the city. Unlike California, Cleveland was near Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Detroit, allowing potential rivalries similar to the Browns-Steelers and Ohio State-Michigan matchups.
With the approval and move done so hastily, the club had little time to set up a marketing campaign in Cleveland to announce their presence. The Barons never recovered from the lack of visibility.
By January 1977, Melvin Swig warned the NHL the team might not finish the season due to payroll issues. Amid $2.4 million in losses, players went unpaid for two months, and a proposed 27% pay cut was rejected. The league considered folding the team mid-season, but a last-minute deal—funded by Swig, the other 17 owners, and the NHLPA—kept the Barons afloat.
After finishing last, Swig sold the team to the Gund brothers. In 1977–78, the Gunds invested in the team, and early results were promising. The Barons won four out of their first five games, and later stunned the defending Stanley Cup champion Canadiens defeating them 2-1 in their first match up of that season.
However, the momentum didn’t last, and the team collapsed to last place by mid-season where they would finish the year. During this same time, the Minnesota North Stars and the Kansas City Scouts were both also having serious financial difficulties.
The Gund brothers pitched the idea of merging the Barons with the North Stars franchise, which the NHL reluctantly went along with. The deal was formalized on June 14, 1978, with the North Stars absorbing the Barons, and the Gund brothers taking over as the new owners of the North Stars.
After the Merger
Starting with the 1981-82 season, the NHL realigned its divisions to reduce travel costs, moving the North Stars into the more centrally based Norris Division. That same year, Minnesota traded up in the draft to select top prospect Brian Bellows, who made an immediate impact with 35 goals and helped the team earn a franchise-best 96 points.
Seeking to break through, the team replaced coach Murray Oliver with Bill Mahoney and traded fan favorite Bobby Smith to Montreal for forwards Mark Napier and Keith Acton.
The shakeup paid off briefly, as Minnesota captured the 1983-84 Norris Division title and reached the Conference Finals before being swept by Wayne Gretzky’s Oilers.
By the late 1980s, the North Stars had hit a low point, winning just 19 games in 1987-88 and ranking near the bottom of the league in attendance. The lone bright spot was drafting future Hall of Famer Mike Modano, who became the face of the franchise.
Declining fan interest led the Gunds to explore relocating the Stars to the San Francisco Bay Area; however, the relocation request was denied by the NHL. As a compromise, the league’s planned expansion franchise for the Bay Area was awarded to the Gund brothers, who then sold the North Stars to a group led by Morris Belzberg and Howard Baldwin.
The expansion team—future San Jose Sharks—would receive players from Minnesota, while the North Stars participated in the expansion draft.
Norman Green, former co-owner of the Calgary Flames, later bought out Baldwin and Belzberg, taking controlling interest in the North Stars by the end of 1990.
The next year, Minnesota shocked the league with a Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Finals, defeating Chicago, St. Louis, and Edmonton before falling to Mario Lemieux’s Penguins.
After being denied a move to Anaheim, Norm Green looking to relocate the North Stars out of Minnesota, chose Dallas, Texas instead. On March 10, 1993, the North Stars officially became the Dallas Stars, ending more than 25 years of NHL hockey in Minnesota.
A few years later, in November 1996, five investors formed Columbus Hockey Limited and submitted a $100,000 NHL application fee. Columbus voters were considering a referendum to build a publicly financed arena, a key step for the NHL bid. League Commissioner Gary Bettman, met with local leaders, who said that they wouldn’t fund the arena if the referendum failed. Privately, investor John H. McConnell guaranteed an arena would be built regardless. The bid suffered when the May referendum failed, but just as John H. McConnell promised, Nationwide would later agree to finance the $150-million arena and in June of 1997, the NHL awarded Columbus a franchise. A “Name the Team” contest received 14,000 entries, eventually narrowing it down to Blue Jackets. The team was officially named the Blue Jackets in November, which referenced Ohio’s role in the Civil War. On June 23, 2000, the Blue Jackets and coincidentally Minnesota’s new team the Wild participated in the NHL expansion draft.
A year later, the name “Cleveland Barons” was revived once more, when the San Jose Sharks bought the AHL club, the Kentucky Thoroughblades in 2001. The club decided to rename the Thoroughblades in honor of the old AHL and short-lived NHL club the “Cleveland Barons”. The team would remain in Cleveland until the 2006-07 season, when they relocated to Worcester (WUH-ster), Massachusetts and were renamed the “Worcester (WUH-ster) Sharks”. Around this time, Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert bought the inactive “Utah Grizzlies” AHL franchise and moved them to Cleveland as a replacement for the Barons. The club was renamed to the “Lake Erie Monsters” and then later to the “Cleveland Monsters” which they remain to this day.
The Cleveland Barons may have lasted only two seasons, but their story rippled through hockey history. Born from the ashes of the California Golden Seals, they vanished into a merger that helped shape the modern NHL. The Gund brothers carried their vision from Cleveland to Minnesota and ultimately to San Jose, where the Sharks became one of the league’s most successful modern franchises.
Back in 2012, TIME Magazine ranked the top 10 best and worst sports relocations of all time. The California Golden Seals move from the bay area to Cleveland to become the Barons was ranked number first on their all-time worst relocations. Do you agree with this list? Should the Cleveland Barons be ranked as the worst relocated team? Or do you think another relocation should be listed higher? Let me know in the comments below!
If you’ve enjoyed this post, check out my full histories on the California Golden Seals and The Minnesota North Stars. Each of those articles goes deeper into the rise and fall of both clubs and how those franchises impacted the NHL as we know it today. As always please like and subscribe if you haven’t already, and thanks for reading!
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